Infraction

By Yvonne Zipter

Marya Zhukova is a woman of many passions. Her husband isn't one of them. It's mathematics and literature that captivate her, in part, but her lover, Vera, enthralls her most of all. These are, however, all dangerous obsessions in the socially turbulent St. Petersburg of 1875. Marya is the fiery center of a small solar system of characters, each of whom depends on her to light their own lives. There is her aunt Lidia, a spinster who, dying of consumption, exacts from her niece a promise to marry. There is Grigorii, Marya's one-time math teacher, who longs for his former pupil to achieve the scholarly glory he cannot. There is Vera, a young tutor surprised to find she's fallen in love with a woman. There is Sergei, an earnest librarian captivated by Marya and willing to do whatever it takes to be near her, even if that means a platonic marriage. But when Sergei is consumed with desire for Marya, his anguish over the promise he made sets in motion a deadly chain of events. St. Petersburg itself adds a richness to these characters as they walk and muse along the city's canals or bounce along the rutted streets behind a hardy droshky driver on their way to dine at Privato or Leiner's Deli or to watch ballet at the Marinsky Theater. Inspired by a real-life account, Infraction takes place at a time when women who yearn for more find that freedom comes at a cost.

 

Praise for Infraction

 

"Infraction re-creates 19th-century Russia and what it was like to be a woman who loved women in that time and place. Marya, Yvonne Zipter's brilliant and feisty young heroine, lives through the excitement of revolutionary new ideas about women's rights, the delirium of passionate same-sex love, and the anguish caused by a society's refusal to acknowledge and honor women's relationships. Through Zipter's vivid and compelling writing, we walk every step of the way with Marya."

— Lillian Faderman, author of Surpassing the Love of Men, Odd Girls, Twilight Lovers, and Naked in the Promised Land

 

"Infraction, the first novel by accomplished poet and nationally syndicated columnist Yvonne Zipter, is a poignant tale of suppressed yearning and potential. In 19th-century Russia, which is more of an infraction for Marya Zhukova, her love for mathematics or for a woman? Zipter's evocative book is based on a true story of a gifted gay geometer who was forbidden to follow both her head and her heart. Infraction will leave you reeling for how much has been squandered in the name of tradition and status quo."
— Mary Kay Zuravleff, author of Man Alive! and The Bowl Is Already Broken

 

"Part adventure story, part cautionary tale, Infraction opens a door on the inner lives of women in 19th-century Russia whose desire to love and to live a life of the mind comes at a price. Daring, delightful, and dangerous, filled with vivid details and keen emotional insight, Zipter's novel is an important and intriguing exploration of the forbidden and transgressive at a time when what was not spoken too often hid a life-or-death truth."
—Kim Barnes, author of In the Kingdom of Men

 

"With elegant prose and authentic period detail, Yvonne Zipter's Infraction brings to vibrant life an aspect of tzarist Russian society all-too-frequently ignored: women's same-sex romances and struggles to secure the dignity of independence."
— Daniel M. Jaffe, translator of the best-selling Russian novel, Here Comes the Messiah!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rattling Good Yarns Press
• Release date: May 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781955826044

Yvonne Zipter

Yvonne Zipter is the author of the full-length collection The Patience of Metal (Hutchinson House), which was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist, and the chapbook Like Some Bookie God. Her poems have appeared in numerous periodicals, including Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, Bellingham Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review, as well as in several anthologies. She is also the author of two nonfiction books, Diamonds Are a Dyke's Best Friend and Ransacking the Closet. A retired manuscript editor for the University of Chicago Press, she lives in Chicago, where she has shared her home with a number of retired racing greyhounds over the years.

Book preview

Part I

We arrive at truth not by reason only

but also by the heart.

---

~Blaise Pascal~

1

Marya

The wood of Marya’s desk wore a skin of dust and was littered with an untidy heap of papers, worn pencils, a circular brass logarithmic scale, a pen with an ink-crusted nib, a protractor, and broken bits of eraser, all also covered in dust. During the many months of her long depression, she had neglected her work, leaving her desk to stand lonely as a grave marker.

If you put so much as a pair of mittens on an already heavy cart, you will notice it immediately, thought Marya, shaking her head sadly.

loss + loss + loss n = too much to bear

Marya automatically translated the old proverb into a mathematical equation of sorts in her head. The deaths of her mother, then brothers, and finally her father—those had been true agonies to withstand. And they had, indeed, brought her to her knees. Yet each time, she forced herself to rise again, to move forward, to carry on with life.

But when it came to Katya—her departure was the additional weight on the already heavy cart.

The ensuing depression into which Marya plunged was like a bottomless well. She had grown weak, unkempt, listless.

And this is the result, she thought, brushing some dust from the desk, then lifting a sheet of paper to blow the dust off of it.

How her aunt had tried to rouse her! Lidia had devised all manner of distractions and outings for her. And when none of them worked, she began inviting gentleman callers to their home for twice-weekly salons, insisting Marya attend.

The best and brightest St. Petersburg has to offer, her aunt had said.

Marya shook her head at the memory.

Week after week, she had at remained entrenched in her lethargy. But the vapidity of these gentlemen callers!

Oh, she’d been roused, alright! But perhaps not in the way her aunt had been hoping. The polite prattle of these so-called gentlemen threatened to numb her brain like a draught of absinthe, and she found herself itching, again, to challenge her mind.

She sat down, now, at her desk for the first time in months, dismayed at the disarray but determined to impose a sense of order so that she might again resume some measure of mathematical study. Among the scattered tools and mathematical scribblings, Marya found a draft of a letter she had written to Grisha, her mathematics instructor at the St. Petersburg Institute for Girls. She was dismayed at how pitiful she sounded, even to herself, and how transparent her protestations in that missive seemed. She couldn’t recall, now, whether she had in fact posted a copy of this letter but hoped that, if so, her final version excluded the sort of cheerless formalist musings she found upon the page before her.

Mathematics! she read. The symbols are quite as meaningless as the entirety of life. We move the symbols around as though with reason, but it’s naught but a game. Grisha, how is it you persist, when your livelihood is bereft of meaning? You and I, we should do honest work, Grisha—fashion leather into humble boots or till the fields. Even selling kvas upon the streets would be more honest, for don’t people need to drink and wash away their sorrows?

She groaned aloud as she scanned further the contents of the letter, praying she hadn’t sent the letter in any version. The rules! How arbitrary are the rules? Can I not as easily tell you π = 2,004 or 0.11 as 3.14? We have assigned a certain meaning to π that allows us to play games in which we say, ‘Here the size of this circle’ or ‘The way across, from this side to the other, is so many units,’ much as we have assigned the name ‘shoe’ to the leather article that houses a foot. If we had given it, instead, the name, ‘dog,’ then each day I would be hooking closed the buttons of my dog! Here she couldn’t quite suppress a little chortle, confronted with this comical image. But no such humor seemed to have seized her, it would seem, the day of the letter’s writing, for she went on there in quite a sour vein: And then what have we proved, Grisha? I’m at pains to understand how such games played with symbols—meaningless marks created by whom?—once gave me solace.

Looking at these words, Marya’s face showed the strain of trying to reach, again, whatever place she’d been in that would bring her to say such unfeeling things about something so vital, so primal, as mathematics. Meaningless? All of human progress had ridden on the backs of numbers! Games with symbols? Bridges, houses, the huffing engine of a train—none would be present across the globe were it not for mathematics. A house might be built with no reckoning of units, but the many-sized walls would wobble in the fierce winds that shriek across the Gulf of Finland or beneath winter’s heavy white cap of snow. And soon such a house must surely topple to the ground. What conceit! she thought, to believe that she, or any human, might, of a whim or fancy, invent mathematics. The elements of mathematics were like a vein of gold, waiting only to be tapped, or like trees, which are there whether one looks upon them or no. Unable—happily so—to regain that dark point that would have spawned the sort of despair that would cause one to deny the existence, the pure fact, the supremacy of mathematical knowledge caused Marya to shake her head in sad wonder. What manner of misery would deny the importance of a factorial? She was incredulous at her own audacity, hardly believing it was she who had written such scurrilous words.

Again she prayed she had not sent such a hateful letter to someone like Grisha who alone, among all her limited circle, revered the power of mathematical inquiry. Marya tore the letter in fourths and placed the pieces into the ceramic stove, pausing before closing the door in order to watch them turn to ash.

2

Lidia

Seated at her desk near the window in her bedroom, Lidia was transfixed by a tiny tuft of feathers stuck to the windowpane. She watched as it trembled in the cold breeze, moved up and down and side to side but didn’t blow away. How can something so insignificant cling so tightly to what it knows? She didn’t pause to ask herself why a tuft of feathers should want to take root upon her window nor what calamity might have brought the feathers to rest there in the first place. She pondered only their tenacity. With a structure so tender, how did they withstand the tugging and pummeling of a force so much mightier and more eternal than they?

She felt a tingling in her veins from the blood coursing through but avoided the question of whether this could be good for her wasting health. Since Marya had come to stay with her, this hot coursing had become a familiar sensation. If it wasn’t good for her, she didn’t want to know: it was the most alive she’d felt in years. Irony, she thought wryly, is wasted on the dying.

With Marya came a surfeit of questions. This, no doubt, was what was at the root of her routinely surging blood. Why was Marya behaving so indecorously with those fine young men? Did she mean to embarrass her aunt? But why?—when Lidia had never been anything but kind to her. But then, just the same—why drive them away, the most handsome and eligible men of Petersburg? Could her loyalty to Katya run so deep she dared not sully it and so shunned all others? Lidia remembered how it had been for her when she had learned of her childhood friend Irina’s betrothal and the changes that signified. At first when Irina said she was to marry the dark-eyed Andrei Khlebnikov, Lidia had squealed excitedly, and the two girls clasped arms and jumped and spun in a circle like leaves caught in an eddy of wind. But the realization that Irina would be moving to Moscow after her wedding had been like a stone on her heart.

Still, she found it improbable that it was Marya’s fondness for Katya that was preventing her from pressing onward with her life. Though Lidia didn’t ultimately fare well in transferring her own affections from Irina to a young man of her set was beside the point. Propriety must always prevail over passion among people of their social standing.

No, it must be some other thing distancing her niece from such fine gentlemen. Perhaps Marya has been damaged by the endless talk, so prominent these days, about the rights of women? Or was it possible Masha was simply fundamentally unable to play the coquette, and nothing more? She has the face of a beauty, but only hell likes her temper, thought Lidia.

Ultimately, Lidia decided the answers to these questions were not important; that Masha was engaged once again with life—that was the important thing. Lidia would have been the first to admit the salons hadn’t been quite what she’d envisioned. Nevertheless, it was clear to her there was nothing to do but continue to entice the eligible men of Petersburg to her doorstep. If Lidia wouldn’t behold the blushes and flirtations forthcoming from her niece as she’d hoped, then smirks and flashes of fire in her eyes would have to do. Perhaps Marya would come round in the end, and if not, the vitality returned to her grief-drained face made the experiment worthwhile. Furthermore, Lidia reminded herself, she had no other plan.

When she had begun hunting for a mate for Marya, it was for Marya’s sake she had risen to the challenge, but now, strangely, she was even more noticeably infused with vitality than Marya. It was she—who was, in fact, slowly dying—who now felt more vibrant than she had in years.

One morning, however, found Lidia sitting at the edge of her bed. She held a white handkerchief bordered with silvery lace. At its center: an irregular splash of color. She stared at this splotch of color as it turned from shiny crimson to a dull rust. She had begun to cough up blood.

Certainly that’s a handkerchief ruined, she said to herself, refusing to think any more deeply about the matter, but even then, she couldn’t bring herself to put the handkerchief down. So this is my blood, she thought. She had watched it seep from a cut in her hand, on her foot, or a dozen other places on her body, of course, in her long life, but this blood, the blood now holding her attention, had come from a place she couldn’t see and was anything but regular. This blood was mystical, mesmerizing, unstoppable. How can you stop something you can’t even see, can never touch the source of? She sensed her life was leaving her—could ascertain as much from the dark stain on her handkerchief—and she could do nothing about it, no matter how much work she had yet to do on Marya’s behalf.

At the same time, she reminded herself, so much had already been accomplished: in spite of Marya’s inhospitable style of entertaining, the twice-weekly gatherings Lidia had engineered had clearly been good for her. Not since Katya had left had Lidia sensed such keenness in her niece’s face, such flash in her eyes, such joy in her smile.

Aunt, Marya announced one night at dinner, I believe I shall attend the Alarchin courses. So eager was she to relate this plan, she let a trickle of borscht dribble down her chin. She frowned and wiped the soup away. Yes, she continued, and hurriedly spooned up the last of the soup in the bowl. I began thinking about it shortly after you started inviting those dreadful young men to our house.

Lidia opened her mouth to defend either the young men or herself—she had not quite decided which—when Nadezhda came in to clear the soup things.

Thank you, Nadya, Lidia said instead.

"You must admit, Lidia, for you can’t fail to have noticed, I’m just as bright as they are, even if they are generally too pompous to realize it. I do owe them a debt of gratitude, though. Their inane conversations about horses and gambling and tobacco and their trite perceptions concerning literature have made me yearn for something more intellectually stimulating. I long, dear Lidia, to converse with equals, to be challenged to think deeply and clearly. Such fellows as those we’ve entertained here only present me with the challenge not to slap their self-assured faces! The prigs. Why do you insist on tormenting me this way, aunt?"

Marya scowled.

Lidia meant to ask how it was she found her way to the drawing room each Tuesday and Thursday evening, given her obvious antipathy, but Marya rushed on before Lidia could put forth her question.

Yes, aunt, I’m thinking the evening lectures would be just the thing. I’ll be among women there, who are as a rule a more charming race than men. It appalls me now to think on how much I adored the male sex as a child and shames me to realize how indifferent I was to my own kind. But really, I don’t think the fault was mine. She paused to sample a morsel of the smoked goose Nadya had brought out, pinching a piece directly from the bird on the platter. She licked the grease from her fingers, then continued. Some transformation takes place, I think—she paused to chew the piece of goose she had in her mouth—that turns little boys into gloating dullards and at the same time turns simpering little girls into great companions. She frowned and took another bit of goose, this time with a fork from the piece on her own plate. Yes, I think that’s it! What do you think, Lidia, dear?

Well, yes, Masha, I do count among my dearest friends many women, but—

I wonder what those boys I played with back home at Khrupkaya Luna are like now. She didn’t seem to notice she had interrupted. Do you suppose it’s only among the gentry that men grow so stupid? Maybe men of the lower classes are of a finer cut—do you suppose that’s true, aunt? Think of Ilya—you don’t find him babbling on only to hear himself talk. My math instructor at the institute, Grigorii Rostovtsev, seems clear thinking as well. One won’t, at any rate, find him holding the opinion he is cleverer than any of his fellows, nor even than his students.

Lidia had given up any hope of interjecting her own thoughts into the conversation, as Marya effervesced for the remainder of the meal. But what a pleasant music by which to eat, she thought to herself: the animated voice of her niece.

3

Marya

It’s important for you to learn how to be a lady in all parts of society, my dear. Your ‘Alarchin courses’ will be of no help in that regard, her aunt had said. There was no mistaking her aunt’s disdain for the lecture courses that Marya had proposed to attend.

And with those words, Marya had been compelled by her aunt to dine with her and her cronies, Anna Karmazinova and Olga Levitskaya.

Marya thought to protest, of course. If she found the conversation of the gentlemen that called on them tedious, how much more tiresome the nattering of a gathering of old society women? But given that her aunt would almost certainly have been unable to make her way to the carriage on her own, Marya relented. And when her aunt leaned heavily both on her on one side and on her long-time servant Ilya on the other, Marya suspected her aunt’s insistence on her company served another purpose beyond the one stated.

At Anna’s house, Marya, mute as a fish, sat at the ornately outfitted table along with the three others—four, if one were to count Anna’s little Italian greyhound, Kalach, who sat on his mistress’s lap. His soulful brown eyes looked huge and bulging on his slender white head. Marya found him a queer creature—somewhere between cat and canine—when compared to the borzois and wolfhounds she’d grown up with at Khrupkaya Luna, her family’s estate.

When Anna was paying no attention, the little beast would purloin paper-thin slices of smoked elk tongue from her plate. Naughty boy, Anna would say when she chanced to notice his pilfering, then stroke him tenderly. Give mama a kiss.

Ordinarily, Marya would have found this droll, but on this occasion, she instead watched the scene with the detached interest of a theatergoer at a second-rate play, brooding about the time she had lost during her mourning over Katya—and now to suffer through this frivolousness? She could be reading a math text! Even reading a novel by Tolstoy would be better than sitting among these rattlebrains.

Here, darling, Anna said, as she deposited the miniature greyhound in Marya’s lap. Would you be a dear and hold Kalach while I ask cook to prepare the sweetmeats? Where is that serving girl?

The world of lapdogs was truly peculiar to Marya. A dog should be used for hunting, Marya thought—that was a true dog, a dog with dignity. With purpose. Nevertheless, she couldn’t help but be charmed by Kalach, who sat on her lap without complaint, his comically small head on her breast. His ear flickered and tickled Marya’s chin, and she absently fingered his collar, where she found a small gold plaque attached. She turned it over and discovered that a short verse had been inscribed there: I promise no largesse / To the person who finds me. / Whoever returns me to my mistress / Will be rewarded—he will see her. Marya frowned.

There. Now that’s settled. Anna glided back into the room like a fragrant breeze.

Marya was about to lift Kalach to return him to Anna, but as Anna seemed not to notice either of them in the least, Marya was content to let the little warm creature curl in her lap again and idly rested her hand on his haunch. Though the thought wasn’t conscious, Marya felt some measure of peace from the warmth and life of him pressed against her.

Now, my dears, Anna said, while sliding as fluidly back into her chair as she did the conversation, you haven’t found yourself so swayed, have you, by those among us who fancy themselves reformers that you won’t plan this winter’s charity ball? She fussed with the edging of lace along the neckline of her dress.

Please! said Olga with a wave of her left hand, while with her right, she snared a piece of honey cake from the plate the serving girl was setting on the table. People these days—they worry far too much. She took a small bite of honey cake. Why should it be of concern if we spend a few rubles on flowers, ribbons, and pearls? She paused briefly to push back a small bit of cake that threatened to tumble from her mouth. Why shouldn’t we enjoy ourselves while we raise money for those poor unfortunates? What is the harm, after all? She licked the honey from her fingers, then dusted a few crumbs from her bosom.

Yes, said Anna, "I quite agree with that writer in the Stock Exchange News—a charity ball is but inoffensive vanity (if vanity you find it), and it has benefited many useful social causes." She leaned forward toward the plate of cakes and lifted a piece to her own plate with the silver server. She smoothed the napkin on her lap, then delicately raised her fork, as if moving too quickly might frighten the cake away.

Marya sighed. Their endless talk grated on her. She pinched the bridge of her nose. Kalach growled softly in his sleep and nestled more deeply into her lap. She ran her fingers along his neck, finding his relative stillness preferable to the prattling of her aunt and friends.

What I can’t bear, said Lidia, are those who find our philanthropic work not ‘scientific’ and condemn almsgiving as an encouragement to beg. Our own Jesus Christ, after all, was a beggar! And all the saints as well! Were I less wedded to my comforts and were I again unencumbered … Lidia silently indicated her niece with a movement from her eyes. I should be tempted to give all I own to the poor and roam the streets myself, like Blessed Ksenia. No doubt I should be adjudged insane as she was—her whom they called a ‘fool-for-Christ.’ Giving succor to others—how is that madness? I tell you, she that has no money needs no purse.

Lidia poked a bony finger at the air. How things would be simplified, if money were of no concern. That woman will be canonized someday, mark my words. It had been almost a hundred years since Ksenia Petrova had become a widow, given away her husband’s fortune, and taken to the streets in his military uniform. Yet so famous had her story become that Anna and Olga both gave involuntary shudders at the thought of their friend following her lead and sleeping in fields on the outskirts of town, relying on handouts from strangers for her sustenance.

Oh, really now, Lida—this is all going too far. I can’t picture you wandering the streets of Petersburg in nothing but a ragged gown. What would the good in that be? The poor are better served with you here among us. Anna reached across the table and patted Lidia’s hand.

Yes, chimed in Olga. You must remember the old saying, ‘The beggar is fed by the rich man, and the rich man is saved by the beggar’s prayer.’ It’s our spiritual duty to take up charity work! If the reformers—

The reformers! Bah! Lidia shook her head. They treat poverty as though it were a problem one could solve, when Christ himself said, ‘You always have the poor with you.’ Too much change. All the time change. Why do people wish always to alter the world?

I don’t see the need. Anna flew from her chair, made an imperceptible adjustment to a frame upon the wall behind Marya, and was quite settled again before the breath of her last word had fully cleared her lip. Why, the tsar himself, she continued, "has given his blessing to the work we do! Have you not witnessed charitable societies like ours grow to life everywhere? What we do isn’t frivolous, my dear friends: it’s our duty to relieve the suffering of the poor. It’s like saying there is a science to loving. What did the pamphlet on charity say? The best person … Oh, what was it now?" Anna smoothed her dress at the waistline.

The best person is the one who … who loves people the most, Olga filled in, and who … who brings them the most assistance. Or something of the sort. I think, ladies, it’s clear to which group we belong. We have tradition, God, and the tsar on our side; let the reformers say what they will. Now enough of that—let us turn our thoughts to our charity ball.

And on they went in like vein, until Marya joined Kalach in a nap, there on her chair, and ceased listening. Marya had certainly been little tamed by her time at the Institute where matters of civility and deportment were concerned. She had never cared much for tradition, perhaps owing to her father’s delight in her mischief and his having taught her to hunt—about which he’d had loud disagreements with her mother. But never had she cared less about tradition than now, so soon after she had lost her beloved Katya to the senseless tradition of arranged marriage.

To Marya, tradition was a null set, made of nothing—notions and empty words and pointless acts. Tradition, she believed, existed but to justify those things that are done the same, year in and year out, each decade, even across the centuries. Making the sign of the cross over a baby before it sleeps, welcoming visitors with a round loaf on which a saltcellar rests, waiting for the first star to appear in the sky before beginning the Christmas Eve meal—each no more than tradition. Each based on nothing more compelling than superstition and repetition, near as Marya could discern.

But perhaps the most inane and degrading convention of all, to her way of thinking, was the one that promised a woman to a man she had not herself chosen. If one were searching for an example of a degenerate iterative process, one would need look no further than the custom of choosing husbands for women! Why, she wondered, would a woman submit to such degradation? A man might just as well choose a woman’s shoes each day, decide the flavor of her kvas, the herbs with which she scents her bath, or the number of bites into which she cuts her meat!

These were the thoughts that occupied her mind during the carriage ride home, while Lidia let it be known that her behavior had been unbecoming—much as it was with the gentleman callers, she’d added.

Your father, it seems, wasted his money! You learned nothing about how to comport yourself in society at that St. Petersburg Institute for Girls!

Yes, aunt. Marya sighed. All her life, she had heard similar complaints about her unruly nature—from her mother, her nanny, her teachers. One can’t wash a black dog until it turns white, she thought, trying to comfort herself about her inability to be a lady. Was there anywhere she’d ever fit in?

After she and Ilya had gotten Lidia up to her room, where she collapsed on her bed, exhausted from their short excursion, Marya left her aunt in the caring hands of Nadezhda and Liudmilla and retired to her own room.

The windows of that room, in the apartment at no. 112 on the Moika, overlooked Novaya Gollandia—the naval yard on the far side of the canal, from which no sound could be heard but the clatter of timber and the occasional shout of a navy man as planks for ships were stacked behind the porous screen of trees. Such sounds of labor and the most common of men would have been far preferable to the jabbering of the society people with whom her aunt wished she would more seamlessly blend.

The promise of the Alarchin courses threaded through her thoughts as Marya fell asleep with a copy of the Historical Herald next to her on the bed.

4

Vera’s Journal

5 November 1875

Years hence, when all I may remember of the Alarchin courses is the startling woman I met the first night I attended, will it matter what brought me there at the start? It seems unlikely any save myself (and perhaps not even I) shall concern themselves with my hope to preserve my position as tutor to the Solovyov children to ensure they don’t quickly outstrip the meager education granted by the pedagogical course. Tonight, to be sure (though I can’t speak for the future), my only care is for how a simple smile might come to send a river of emotion flooding through me and overrun my breath.

For that’s what happened when I sat beside the woman with a mop of chestnut brown hair, which she wore brushed back (cut à la mouzhik, as they say), when she turned to me and smiled, though I dare say I should have noticed the smile regardless because it was such a contrast to her slightly melancholy, rather pensive face—like a ray of light piercing a cloudy sky. I returned her smile, of course—how could I not?—but that the lecture then began is all to the good as I felt distinctly peculiar. Throughout the lecture my heart beat erratically.

I cast sidelong glances to determine what force was tugging at my heart in this way, which only made my state worsen, especially when my glance was met with that disarming smile. I must have blushed a half dozen times or more during the course of the lecture, certainly at least in part because she was dressed so queerly, her clothes plain and dark. A Narodnik? This thought but inflamed my curiosity and my enthrallment the more, for I had never met in person a socialist or populist or whatever it was they stood for. In consequence, I applied myself more diligently to the pretense of note-taking at each such occurrence to try to hide my discomfiture.

And when, after the lecture, Marya—for such is her name: Marya Iuryevna Zhukova—spoke to me, I could hardly hear her words, there was such an insistent buzz—nay: a roaring—in my head. I thought for a moment I was becoming ill, but the sensations I was feeling were much too pleasant for that. I did manage to calm myself, at last, and joined Marya in conversation. I was impressed immediately by her sharpness of mind, her earnestness, her attentiveness. It seemed perfectly natural then, when she invited me to attend the meeting to which she intended to go, to accompany her. As we strolled to a nearby apartment, she linked her arm through mine, and we walked together like old friends.

We arrived at our destination at the very moment several other women did, and the lot of us joined the ten or fifteen women already assembled. In an instant, one could sense this wasn’t a typical gathering of young women, giggling and gossiping and primping. Small groups of three or four women were scattered round the room, each of which was engaged in quiet, ardent discussion. The air was so thick with cigarette smoke, I found it difficult at first to breathe. After our coats had been taken by a servant and we had found our way to the samovar, one woman clanked her spoon at the edge of her cup and we all found seats.

The Alarchin courses are a means to an end, she began. Ultimately, what we are trying to do is free ourselves from the stagnant past, from ‘tradition,’ a tradition of family and marital authority that has served to make slaves of us, that has kept us from the larger goals of self-development and, especially, of working for the betterment of our society as a whole.

Yes, interjected a second woman. Personal relationships are an obstacle to women doing real work in the world. I’ve no intention of marrying and subverting all of my energies into bearing child after child. Into running a household!

Yes.

I agree.

Exactly right.

Voices of assent rose up around the room,